22 - Court Martial

I trudged aimlessly up the stairs. I was probably looking for Alex or Donnie, even Chas.

Instead, I was waylaid in the foyer. Major Thompson stood squarely in my path and I didn’t realise it was him until I was forced to look up at the impassable obstacle.

‘Major Thompson!’ I blurted, and stepped back involuntarily. It was a shock to find him so physically close. ‘Were you looking for me?’

‘Doesn’t really matter if I was or not,’ he verbally shrugged. ‘I’ve found you now.’ He took hold of my arm and guided me round to face the way I had just come. ‘Let’s go back down. We need to talk. Besides, you won’t like the look of your old place.’

‘Why not? What’s happened to it?’

‘Titans. They’ve taken it. Inevitable. Once they get in, there’s nothing anybody can do to stop them. You can slow them down, if you know how and can be bothered, but they’ll outlast you. They’ll break you. They want it so much more than you do. I just hope you didn’t leave anything up there you’re too attached to.’

I hadn’t.

We arrived back in the basement. I automatically made for the yellow door, but Thompson headed off far to the left.

‘Major?’ I called after him.

‘Follow me,’ he said without turning his head. I hesitated a second, then ran to catch him up.

‘Is there another way down?’ I panted. He moved much more quickly than he looked capable of.

‘Of course there’s another way down. Do really think I would allow that idiot to paint the only door bright yellow?’

Actually, I had thought that was exactly what he had allowed to happen. I felt both reassured and stupid, but concentrated on keeping up and banished my feelings for a moment.

The door we entered through bore a very close resemblance to the original one before it had suffered at Corporal Young’s hands. In other words, it was almost completely invisible and would never have been located by the uninitiated.

‘Is this the only alternative entrance, Major, or are there others?’ I asked. His face betrayed a tiny hint of acknowledgement. It was, perhaps, the only truly inquisitive question I had ever posed to him. He remained silent, though.

I could see why the other route down was more widely used. This passageway was dark and cold and damp and my feet felt decidedly unsafe on the surface. No stone steps had been cut into the rock, but it fell away unevenly, always downward, between constantly flexing and contracting walls. I tried talking in a hushed voice to Major Thompson but he made no reply. His steps were firmer and more confident than mine. I realised I was crouching. I eased myself up to my full height carefully, then raised my arm as high as I could. No contact with the ceiling. Thompson was getting away from me, though. His confident footsteps were becoming distant.

My step grew larger, more reckless, in the dank dark, in response to his escaping presence. It was not the sort of place in which to be separated from one’s guide. Four, five bounds like this and I would soon be back, right behind him.

Darkness deepened and silent cymbals crashed in my ears. I instinctively dropped to my haunches. The pain took some time to settle, but when it did, it did so with the arrogance of an uninvited and unbeatable opponent. My whole head swam and I shook with the fear of the unfathomable. Slowly the truth unwound itself from the cacophony and I came to realise: I had walked into a ridge of solid rock where the grotto’s ceiling had suddenly dropped. Damn him: why could we not have taken the familiar path? At least it was reasonably lit and predictable in its configuration. Who cared about the ridiculous yellow door?

My senses began their journey back presently, and I knew I was alone, except for a rapidly growing egg-shaped lump on my head. There was no sign of Thompson at all. I strained to pick up anything in the tacky air. He was gone, that was undeniable. The agony and the shock subsided to no more than a background hum, in the face of my superhuman concentration. Somehow during this assignment I had developed skills I would until recently have considered far beyond my capabilities.

I rose, although not beyond a coiled crouch, and continued at a cautious pace along the infernal path. The gradient was increasing noticeably, and I felt it traced a continuous left-turning arc. I pictured myself hugging the inside wall and rushing blindly down through the benign corkscrew towards God knows what end.

My path was unceremoniously blocked again, although this time the impact was slightly less uncompromising, and only knocked the wind out of me. I searched for it on the stone floor. Above me I thought I heard an exasperated tutting noise. A voice whispered.

‘What the hell are you playing at?’ it growled. ‘Get up and come over here.’

I looked up. There was a tiny stain of weak light bleeding through a gap just above me, to the right. Behind the voice. I focussed on it and my eyes soon adjusted. Thompson was standing at a natural opening in the wall of the path. It was roughly the shape and size of an unglazed window, or a service hatch. I got up and approached carefully, although the visibility came as a huge relief. I could even make out soft voices somewhere in the distance. My senses had returned to life.

The view from the hatch was surreal to the point of physical nausea. Some 30 or maybe 40 feet below, tiny figures of Scharf, Magath and Mortenson played out their latest episode in total ignorance, as far as I knew, of our lofty observance. They moved and they spoke in utterly convincing pastiches of genuine human patterns. It was spellbinding in its accuracy to the tiniest detail. I strained to make out the strings or identify from where they might have been controlled. A more credulous sort might have assumed they were real. If I pretended that they were, just for the few seconds I could handle it, the feeling was as close to an out-of-body experience as anything else. My guts tumbled around inside me like a dog looking for a ball which was long gone.

‘I feel like God,’ I muttered.

‘Hmmmm,’ Thompson turned away from the opening and set off back down the path. ‘Come on. Stay close.’

The lower stretch of the descent was less stressful. The ground remained damp and untrustworthy but patches of light coloured the background its natural stone-grey rather than the pitch black of higher up. Headroom presented no further problems and we were able to walk two abreast, which we did, in silence.

Finally we emerged into a chamber. The path flattened and the rock receded to form a sphere as perfect as The Bunker itself, although slightly smaller. Similar stone plinths lined the outside walls rather than sitting in the middle. Light dribbled in through a much less dense arrangement of light tubes, some of which were clearly cracked and useless. The cave gave off a sense of sudden death. The whole place was spotlessly clean, but life had most certainly been forcibly removed from it at some indistinguishable point in the past.

Major Thompson barely stopped to take in the scene, but strode across to the largest plinth and climbed on top. He beckoned me to follow.

His huge hands slid aside a rock the size of a man, which revealed a passage big enough to scramble through. That is exactly what we did. After ten yards or so we could stand up and walk again. Thompson tapped the wall every three steps as if by habit, although he made no move to slow down or stop while he did so. Eventually he left his fingers on the wall and dragged them carefully behind himself until they caught on a small edge. Once more he pulled back an enormous lump of stone as if it were a curtain, and we passed through. Almost immediately we turned a sharp right-hander back on ourselves and we were in The Bunker. Magath turned his head at our arrival and sniffed the air, although the others seemed not to notice us for some time. I let Thompson wander off between the models. I wasn’t sure if he had seen them completed yet.

Several minutes passed while he moved in and out of the various displays. On a purely human level, his physical form was every bit as distasteful as Corporal Young’s, but there was nothing to offend in the way he took in and appreciated each detail of the work. He even managed a smile or two on his tour.

His enormous frame ended up right in front of me once more. The team sat behind me. I could feel them concentrating.

‘Very impressive,’ he said. ‘Quite clearly a sensible solution, innovative where it needs to be, robust and eminently feasible in terms of implementation. I sense the hands of each of you in the outcome.’

I felt more relaxed than I had at any point in the immediate past. Despite my uncertain views on the Major, I really did value his patronage.

‘It will all have to be redone,’ he added without letting his face drop a millimetre.

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said. I could have sworn he had said it had to be redone.

‘I think you heard correctly,’ he said, plainly.

‘Alright then, why?’

‘Like I said, it will work. It must be the correct solution. Nobody could have engineered a finer response to the most serious problem this country has ever had to face. But it’s not in the correct format. You can’t submit a design like this nowadays. Nobody knows how to interpret it or how to turn it into reality. I’m torn. I love it as much as you do, and yet I know it mustn’t be seen by anybody outside our immediate circle. I’m not even comfortable with Colonel Watson laying eyes on it, and I know he’s planning to visit very soon.’

The bank of faces behind me was as blank as my own. My team didn’t really do expressive reaction, especially recently.

‘What do you think Colonel Watson will make of it?’ I asked him, uneasy as ever at the mention of our senior officer’s name. I considered it unlikely he would save me from a burning room. In fact, he might barricade me in.

‘Of what?’ a strident, confident voice came from around the cave’s entrance. ‘I have the feeling you’re just about to find out, gentlemen!’ It was, needless to say, the Colonel himself.

Captain Norris followed behind the Colonel like a rattlesnake sting. For a change he was on his own. I pretended not to know him.

‘Oh, I see what you mean,’ Watson sneered while he studied our work of art on the largest plinth. He circled it slowly and came to a halt on the far side. I couldn’t see his face behind the enormous tin concertina of the timelock, but I felt a charge in the air that betokened something quite bad about to happen very close by. Major Thompson sat down next to Sergeant Scharf.

Colonel Watson stepped up onto the plinth and advanced slowly, deliberately toward us. He began to swing his arms wildly in unlikely violent whirls. They caught protruding parts of the model, which flew off their mountings into the recesses of the cave. I held my breath. His advance continued unchecked through the heart of our masterpiece, and his fury scythed through the entire creation in a matter of seconds, leaving the bruised components strewn far and wide about the usually immaculate floor. We all watched the act of destruction in silence.

‘I don’t like it,’ he said, stepping off the plinth in front of us. Not a single eye met his. Not one of the cowards behind me could find even a word to say to the man who had just brutalised to death weeks of their inspiration and graft. I waited expectantly for them to speak until I could stand it no more. I rose to face him. I was a couple of inches shorter and sported an enormous red lump on my forehead and he still gave off residual hormones, no doubt stirred up by his recent outburst. In the wild I would never have approached him, but The Bunker was one step closer to civilisation and I put my faith, nervously, in the protection of that flimsy sociological safety net.

‘What have you done to our work, you animal?’ I stood my ground while he came slightly closer.

‘I told you. I don’t like it,’ he repeated, quietly. He had come close enough and now stopped.

‘What is it, exactly, that you don’t like, didn’t like, about it?’ I tried to remain as reasonable as I could.

‘It looks exactly like the Project van Diemen model,’ he said. ‘If I want to see that I can go to their project headquarters. I don’t need to be fed the same thing here.’

My heart ached with despair. I explained in some detail how very much the model he had now annihilated differed from its poor relation. For a start, the thing was infinitely more detailed and stood up to any level of technical scrutiny: van Diemen’s effort was conceived by nothing better than semi-formed guesswork and was a hotbed of fundamental scientific inaccuracies, the direct result of its almost total shelving as soon as we got under way. Ours outshone it in every sense, and it was painted, too. To compare the two was an insult unworthy of a man of his rank.

To my amazement I found an ally behind me. Sergeant Magath pointed out that the van Diemen design had been rendered an irrelevance, at best, by our infinitely superior model.

‘There has also,’ he added, ‘been some pretty impressive work with rodent bones that you might find interesting. I know I did.’

The Colonel, though, was not to be deterred by our defence. ‘I question your confidence in the spectacular superiority of your product,’ he said. ‘And, quite apart from all that, I should remind you, as if you needed reminding, that your model is, was, in the incorrect format. It couldn’t have been submitted as it stood. I know, van Diemen have used the identical format, but they finished their design work before the mandatory change took effect. They have a compliance exemption as a result. This project, I’m afraid, does not fall into that category.’

‘As a matter of fact, Colonel,’ Magath said, ‘that’s not exactly the case. Van Diemen has an exemption, as you point out, but it’s not because they completed design work before the transition to the new model. As a matter of fact, they haven’t completed the design stage at all. Their model is undergoing constant modification, based purely on the results of our work in here. They’re still some way behind us, even though they’re not subject to many of the same constraints, and they are, in fact, very far from completion. The reason behind their exemption is one of complexity. It simply is not possible to illustrate the whole solution using the new model. So they don’t even try. We must do the same.’

The other advantage we held, as I pointed out to Watson once more, was our ability to test comprehensively as soon as we had constructed the test zone, which was in progress. The significance of this breakthrough was our trump card and I was not going to let it be overlooked.

We had fed Watson everything we had. He stood for a while amongst the wreckage of our once-perfect construction and considered. Or at least I supposed he was considering.

‘Interesting,’ he looked squarely at me. ‘You defend your position, naturally. I would expect nothing else. Even you will have learned the value of that approach in your short time with us. Coming up to six weeks now, I believe. And I am going to give you a chance. The best chance I can. A court martial.’

‘A court martial?’ I sputtered. How did that give me my best chance? What were the potential outcomes? Semi-honourable dismissal at best. Death by rabid beast at worst.

‘They will consider all the evidence,’ Watson explained. ‘You’ll find them remarkably objective and fair-minded. I admit that even I am perhaps a little close, emotionally speaking, to the subject and my views might be influenced as a result. Believe me, this is a good break for you. It appears that you’re a lucky man.’

 

‘You got lucky,’ Bernard assured me as he drained another glass of his local white. He had piled on the weight – a testament to his metabolism and his appetites – since moving to the restaurant full time. He refilled his glass and mine. The sun was sinking towards the horizon and the place was eerily quiet. Nobody landed their catch, no birds wheeled, the tables remained defiantly empty, polished glassware glinted complacently in the dying day, no human form around to block the path of the deep bronze light. He surveyed the scene. ‘Calm before the storm,’ he said. ‘Everything needs to take some time now and then to settle, to reform itself into its perfect image, draw breath and return to a state of equilibrium. It’s beautiful how nature seems to decide the time is right and everyone falls into line. Doesn’t take long when nobody’s rocking the boat. Everyone working together. I love these times. Don’t get them so often up in the city, but they come around quite regularly here. You wait. A few more minutes, that’s all. Maybe when the sun’s just touching the surface of the sea and it starts to bleed, that’s when the hubbub’ll build up again. It starts small, but once it’s taken it’s inexorable. Inexorable, I tell you. Before long there’s some of the wildest mayhem you’ve ever imagined. Tonight could be huge. Don’t draw any conclusions from what you can see or hear now.’

‘I can’t see or hear anything now,’ I said. ‘I’ve never known the world so still.’

‘Exactly. So don’t draw any conclusions. Now isn’t the time.’

I shook my head roughly and sat up a bit. I needed to corral him back into my stream of real life. ‘Anyway, what do I need to know about this court martial?’ I asked him. ‘They’re coming in the morning and I can’t afford not to impress them, although I’ve got no idea how I’m going to do that.’

‘Stop worrying about that. Honestly, you’ll sail through it. I’ve been up before hundreds of these things.’ He was right. For some reason, Bernard had attracted the attention of the ultimate council over and over again in the time I had known him, while I had always flown under the radar. I reckoned it was because Bernard created designs which made others notice them. Designs that looked like candidates for conversion into real life. My efforts were more likely to be considered for barbeque kindling. As a result, his need for the regular judgement of his superiors was far greater than mine. ‘Just tell them the truth,’ he counselled. ‘And if that doesn’t work, tell them some lies. Sometimes it helps if you have a few lies prepared beforehand, but just as often the ones made up on the spur of the moment can be so much more convincing. Remember: these people aren’t monsters. They’re just your jury. They have the same weaknesses as anybody else. You can negotiate your way through a session with them. It’s only those who get called back again soon afterwards that need to worry – that means somebody has spotted or said something, and your number’s up.’

We drank until midnight or later. He was right – mayhem.

 

I passed the court martial, as Bernard had predicted. Suitably terrified when the whole lot of them had shown up to The Bunker the next morning, I convinced myself my nerves would work in my favour, so long as I could control and channel them. And one development which most definitely favoured me did catch me by surprise: our model was in perfect order. It had been rebuilt. Even a skilled team of three or four, and I could imagine nobody outside our internal group who might have been capable of contributing to the effort, would have taken all night to complete the challenge. I gave it the once over before the court was called to order. It was complete and flawless. I would have expected nothing else, and guessed that any imperfections would stand out like a throbbing cartoon thumb, but still it was an impressive achievement, one which considerably boosted my confidence.

Major Thompson sat alone in the corner. Ordinarily he would have been one of the senior members of the group, but he removed himself on this occasion specifically. He maintained quite a distance and appeared to show no interest throughout. In fact it was questionable whether he even stayed conscious for the duration. At times I felt sure I noticed his head nodding involuntarily.

Apart from the Major, whose contribution was zero, I was alone. My team were not allowed to join me or represent me in any form. I guessed they had all gone out for a long breakfast. Swimming in The Pool would have been inappropriate. In fact, I thought to myself, I hadn’t seen any swimming for quite a while.

But my isolation did not matter. The council liked the concept. They loved the model. Who wouldn’t? Who couldn’t? Only Corporal Young had been left truly unmoved by it. The presentation in the old format made no difference at all. It was unanimously declared the most suitable medium for a concept so complex, just like Project van Diemen. Many of the individual officers congratulated me on my work.

They didn’t hate me at all. My fears had been proven totally unfounded.

One exchange, however, remained with me long after The Bunker had emptied. I had raised, several times, the question of our six-week time period and the imminence of the nutritional Armageddon awaiting us. One of the younger members of the court, whom I had noticed right from their entrance, due to his slightly superior bearing and his notably smarter shoes, finally picked up on what I said.

‘Are you suggesting,’ he spoke slowly and pointedly, as if he were waiting for somebody transcribing proceedings to catch up, ‘that the country is in immediate peril of starvation and that your project is, concomitantly, under extreme time pressure to deliver its solution?’

I told him what I believed. In other words, I confirmed his summary of my situation.

‘I am unaware of the need for such urgency,’ he cast his eyes around his collected colleagues. ‘I understand, of course, that we have fallen behind our neighbours. Other states have progressed to much more sophisticated and efficient methods of bringing back their bounty. That’s no secret from anybody. Our infrastructure is tired and requires fairly wholesale replacement. But we continue to feed our people quite efficiently. We have adequate distribution networks and a prudent set of contingency supplies.’ There was a general murmur of approval and nodding of experienced heads within the court. ‘In a nutshell, we’re not in such a bad state, and we’re no worse off than plenty of others. The most important factor in this project is quality, not time or even cost. We know that anything you implement here will have to last us for longer than we’d like. That means its design must be beyond reproach and set standards which will last well past what might be considered a normal lifespan. If this is not the case, then we may well find ourselves, after a number of years, in the dire situation you have described. As far as I can tell, you have achieved all that has been asked for within your design. You have worked miracles in the provision of a testing environment, built bridges between warring sets of personnel which I considered unbuildable, and your reputation, I must inform you, has travelled a very long and triumphal way through our organisation.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Of course, I was well aware of the qualities of our design, but the rest of what he said left me aghast. I had been under the impression that every day was bringing us closer to humanitarian disaster on a terrifying scale, and that it was mostly my fault. This young officer’s view, seemingly shared by the court in its entirety, directly contradicted that impression. I searched for any signs in Major Thompson’s expression. Recognition, surprise, anger. Anything that might make sense of it. Up to then I had been so spellbound by what the officer was telling me that I had quite forgotten my boss’s passive presence.

Thompson slouched in his chair, in his distant corner, lit softly by a convenient light tube. His head was tilted slightly forward and to his right, saved from any more extreme angle by the immobility of his monstrous neck, and his breathing came in long, slow, guttural draughts, catching in his flaccid throat every now and then. He was fast asleep.

[Coming next: 23 - Corporal Young]